Identity, Displacement and Perspective: The Black Europe Film Festival of Minneapolis/Saint Paul

The inaugural Black Europe Film Festival (BEFF) took place in Minneapolis/Saint Paul during the early winter days of Black History Month in America. The festival ran from 31 January 2025 to 2 February 2025 and was held in multiple locations throughout the city of Minneapolis. Minneapolis/Saint Paul was a unique setting for this festival as the state of Minnesota is the site of Prince’s cult classic Purple Rain and the home of acclaimed filmmakers, the Coen Brothers. It is also home to various Black immigrant populations like Somalis, Ethiopians, and Liberians and, most recently, was the site where George Floyd was murdered, causing protests throughout the world and disrupting several industries, including the film industry, especially in its reception of Black stories. This was seen in the diverse nominations for the 93rd Academy Awards, the creation and reception of movies like Judas and the Black Messiah (Shaka King, 2021), and shows like Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You (2020).¹ Black stories mattered and were highlighted by several media conglomerates because of this incident in Minnesota, and this festival was also a response to what occurred locally. The organizational team mentioned in many post-film discussions that the thirst for Black stories and discourse in Minnesota post-George Floyd was one of the inspirations for the festival. 

Education and awareness were major aspects of the festival, and that could be because major funding came from the University of Minnesota or because the festival topic was so nuanced to locals; regardless, these aspects were noted throughout the festival. A Q&A with the directors accompanied each film, and they hosted workshops with the local community to foster engagement and knowledge. The festival offered insights into Black Europeans’ celebrations, creativity, and challenges through their worldmaking. Although the films centered on the Black European experience, the emotions the films elicited were not unique. Selected films centered on universal themes of displacement, colonialism, grief, motherhood, queerness, and youth and included coming-of-age stories, performance art, comedies, and action heroes. 

After the Long Rains

In Baada ya masika (After the Long Rains, Damien Hauser, 2023), we follow Aisha (Electricer Kache Hamisi), a starry-eyed young girl from a beautiful coastal village in Kenya who dreams of becoming an actress and moving to Europe. It was one of my favorite films of the festival because it was such a relatable coming-of-age film. One of the funniest scenes in this film is when Aisha was watching a European couple on TV be romantic in the snow, and it reminded me a lot of when I was growing up in West Africa watching “foreign” films. I didn’t want to be an actress like her, but I distinctly remember watching The Bodyguard (Mick Jackson, 1992) up close and personal with our TV and wanting to be Whitney Houston, so I get her. We follow a period in Aisha’s life where her teacher pressures her to decide on a career choice due to her lackluster grades and lack of direction, despite appearing to be under 12. After this she meets a gregarious and mysterious fisherman, Hassan, she decides she wants to be a fisherwoman when she grows up, which sets off a chain reaction in her village. Aisha’s fisherwoman goal is still connected to becoming a star in Europe as she wants to use skills to sail to Europe. 

Aisha is also at an age where she’s examining her relationship with her mother. A relationship which is supposed to be one of unconditional love, but it is made more complex due to cultural and generational differences between mother and daughter. When watching TV, Aisha hears declarations of love often, so she repeats them to her mother, but there’s a level of discomfort Aisha’s mum has toward this level of intimacy and vulnerability from her child that Aisha oddly understands at her young age. One could tell Aisha’s family has love for her and each other, but it is never stated. Still, it is shown through acts like when her brother – who does not want to be a motorbike driver like his father because he’s an aspiring seamster – makes a unique outfit for Aisha for an event. Or her father, who you could call uninvolved but who takes measures to protect what he believes is a threat to her and doesn’t react negatively to her fisherwoman goals. Her family stood out throughout the film because I could never predict their actions, especially with a daughter like Aisha. However, everything they did centered her, and it was so different from what I was expecting, and I loved this portrayal of African childhood. This film was also about connections: Aisha’s connection with Hassan, whose vices and potential everyone but her critiques; her connections with her schoolmates that become disrupted upon her new career goals; and her connections with her family, who respond in different ways to support her. The film isn’t what I would call linear, and the third act felt abrupt, but its themes connect at the end to flesh out a unique coming-of-age tale. 

Edelweiss

The amalgamation of a film festival held in a midwestern state about films of the Afro-European diaspora being reviewed by me, a person with direct origins from the African continent but raised within the American context, is something I thought about to myself often while watching the films, but especially during Edelweiss (Anna Gaberscik, 2023). A film described as a critical love letter to Austria, it was an in-your-face film about Blackness in Austria. It starts with the director having a face-off with a monument of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe of the Goethe Institute and not Mozart (as someone questioned during the Q&A) and is followed by various scenes of spoken word, dance, interviews, and other moving images featuring a multicultural cast of Austrians. The film is named after the famous song from Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965) but provides a look into the lives of immigrants and first- and second-generation Austrians. 

Due to the emphasis on visual art, performance and music, it felt like something made for MTV Europe because it was entertaining, hip, and insightful. Parts of it often felt disconnected, and some interviews went on longer than others, but the points the interviewees made were poignant. Some commented on never feeling at home in Austria and more like a guest or stranger despite being born or raised there. Others commented on their interactions with white supremacy in Austria in a way that is rarely acknowledged and talked about. This film was a way to express these feelings, and initially, I wasn’t sure how I felt about this movie because these feelings and thoughts are so known to me as someone who grew up in America. However, during the director’s Q&A, she acknowledged this. She stated that the film’s themes were not new to Americans but were to Austrians, as it was the first time Austrian audiences had heard about things like this from an Austrian perspective. Gaberscik’s statement resonated with me because I had to acknowledge the differences in the lived experiences of the Black diaspora throughout the festival. She stated that her goal in making the film was to make Austrians, specifically white Austrians, uncomfortable and instigate discussion about these unacknowledged topics. However, I hope she knows it also worked in America, as I saw an older white couple walk out during the film’s U.S premiere. They must have been uncomfortable. 

The Black Sea

Speaking of which, two films evoked my discomfort during this festival. The discomfort doesn’t indicate that the films were bad, but both evoked feelings of complexity in me. A friend who accompanied me described both as subversive coming-of-age stories, which are narratives I enjoy, so that may be telling on why I was uncomfortable. The first was The Black Sea (Derrick B. Harden & Crystal Moselle, 2024), a film about a Black Brooklynite, Khalid (Derrick B. Harden), who finds himself stuck in Bulgaria after an internet romance falls apart. Throughout the film, I was simultaneously scared for and annoyed with him. Khalid is a go-with-the-flow kinda guy, and it shows when none of his friends and family want to help him when he’s stuck in the seaside town of Sozopol due to his irresponsibility. The fact that he is a dark-skinned, tattooed, tall Black man in Bulgaria helps and hinders his pleas for help, too. However, he befriends a local travel agent, Ina (Irmena Chichikova), who bonds with him over their shared love of rap and is the most consistent person who helps him when he is in trouble. The film is entertaining; there are a lot of funny parts, but some parts I didn’t find as humorous due to the themes I gleaned from Edelweiss and my own experiences in Europe. Khalid is a very trusting individual, which helps him make friends and start a business (in an authentic Brooklyn way) but also exposes him to a series of insidious mishaps that had me questioning his connections to the locals and the town. I view this film as a coming-of-age story because his time there helps him become responsible and find direction, and we see his growth throughout the film. Then we get to the third act, which undoes what we’ve seen in what I thought was a random and unnecessary additional conflict that I don’t think was even resolved but may have been, symbolically. 

The second film that elicited my complex feelings was Girl (Adura Onashile, 2023). The mother-daughter dynamic of After the Long Rains deals with unconditional love, but Girl is about the friendship between mother and daughter. It’s about Grace (Déborah Lukumuena) and Ama (Le’Shantey Bonsu), a mother and daughter living in the United Kingdom, in their own world, which is disrupted after a fire occurs while Ama is at home alone at night. This focus on Black motherhood is central to the plot, and we follow the story through Ama’s eyes as she discovers things about her mother that disrupt her idealized view of her. Grace, on the other hand, is immobilized by a traumatic experience, and it shows through her parenting. I didn’t understand the closeness and distance between Grace and Ama throughout the film. It’s never explained why Ama calls her Grace instead of mum and it took me a while to even notice they were mother and daughter. Grace’s traumatic experience is not explicitly shown, but there are snippets of it interspersed throughout the film. What we do see are her panic attacks, compulsive counting, dissociation, and random bursts of frustration to indicate she has not healed from it. The film’s conflict is Ama gaining a friend that’s not her mother and Grace’s response to that. Ama is no longer a latchkey kid; she has questions about the outside world and her body and hangs out with a girl who keeps her from being home with her mum. I couldn’t stop thinking about how Grace withholds intimacy and how Ama craves it from her mum, and it remained with me after the film ended. I believe the movie was a coming-of-age arc for Grace, not Ama, as she was stuck until her daughter’s engagement with the outside world forced her to acknowledge the past and attempt to change. Another thing that stuck out to me was the girlish baubles Ama, her friend, and Grace all wore. I don’t know if it was an intentional decision by the director, but it framed Grace’s arrested development before it was expressed. 

Black Fruit

The festival featured a lineup of themed shorts, including one on Black youth, the Somali diaspora (reflective of the largest Black immigrant population in the state), memory, belonging, and Black queerness. The line-ups varied but were also all-encompassing due to the micro-themes found in each short. I paid particular attention to the Queer Blackness line-up due to the scarcity of these stories. One of the standouts wasn’t a film but an episode from a German series, Schwarze Früchte (Black Fruit, Lamin Leroy Gibba, 2024). Black Fruit follows two Black and Queer Germans living in Hamburg, Lalo (played by the director) and Karla (Melodie Simina). The first episode starts with a queer millennial take on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Stanley Kramer, 1967) full of microaggressions and handled in way you don’t often see and aggravated by Lalo’s relationship, which has run its course. The other half shows Karla as the modern girl boss in corporate Germany and sets a scene that shows it will not bode well for her. Lalo and Karla, our main characters, have separate stories until they unite at the end of the episode to share their days as best friends do, but the end of the episode leaves on a cliffhanger, which sets up the series so well. After the festival, I found myself trying to get an ARD Mediathek subscription to stream the rest of the series, but I have not succeeded, so I urge anyone in Europe who can to watch it to do so in my stead. 

The other short in the Queer Blackness strand that struck me was an experimental film on Queer Nigerians, titled The Archive: Queer Nigerians (Simisolaoluwa Akande, 2023). The film’s visuals and audio are part of the story as the people featured are distorted and hidden. However, as they slowly share more about their experiences, they become more visible, which is symbolic because it is illegal to be gay in Nigeria, so they must hide. One of the people featured was intersex and non-binary and described going home to Nigeria as being in drag because they must make themselves appear feminine to interact with their family. Most of the people featured reside in the UK but struggle with this duality of being queer there and in Nigeria. The film intersperses religious and cultural motifs of the Yoruba tribe again to get at this duality, as most of them are Yoruba and acknowledge the symbolic inclusivity of the gods, myths, language, and names, and the disconnect between that culture and queerness.

We Were Here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe

The featured films of the festival’s last day provided historical context to the Black European experience. Vanus Labor (Salad Hilowle, 2021) and We Were Here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (Fred Kudjo Kuwornu, 2024) focused on Black representation in mediums before film, like paintings and diaries. Using the diaries of an enslaved boy named Coschi, who worked for the Swedish Royal Family, Hilowle used his film to show how we remember the past. Kuwornu’s documentary challenges the myth of the absence of Black people in early European art and their influence on European history by interviewing scholars, activists, and artists to fill in these knowledge gaps. It details unknown historical figures of African descent like Alessandro de’ Medici, Simonetta da Collevecchio, and Juan de Pareja with beautiful historical re-enactments through costuming and stylistic lighting choices. The film highlights what Stuart Hall calls the regime of representation as museums typically feature art of and by white Europeans from that Renaissance era, which leaves out images and stories of Black Europeans who are rendered invisible.² 

However, the last film of the festival, Black Skin (Pavel Kolomoytsev, 1930), a Soviet-era silent film made by a group of Jewish Ukrainian filmmakers, attempts to challenge this regime of representation. The festival organizers claimed it may have been one of the first times it’d be screened outside of Russia, and this may have attracted the large audience who came to watch it, or perhaps it was the eclectic live musical accompaniment by composer Dameun Strange. Black Skin follows Tom (Kador Ben-Salim), a Black American who loses his job at the Ford Factory and accompanies his co-workers to the USSR to work at a car factory there and escape the doom of capitalism. He’s treated like an equal when he arrives, except by his American co-worker. Through hard work and communism, Tom breaks down barriers he couldn’t in America, and his co-worker even starts to see him as equal. Black Skin is Soviet-era propaganda, but it also provides an interesting interpretation of racism from 1930s Europe. The film states, “Racism is capitalist training” and frames communism and integration as antitheses of both racism and capitalism. The story is based on the true story of Robert Robinson, who left the Ford factory to work at the Stalingrad Tractor Factory in the USSR, and coincidentally enough , the actor who plays him was a Senegalese acrobat-turned-actor who settled in the USSR after fighting in the Red Army.³ There is a history of Africans and African Americans going to the Soviet Union to escape racism, and this movie portrays that in a fantastical way.⁴   

There were so many films featured at BEFF I didn’t include in my review like Gravity (Cédric Ido, 2022) which used action heroes, Afro-futurism, and the suburban experiences of Black Parisians in a way that reminded me of a combination of Tupac’s Juice (Ernest Dickerson, 1992) and John Boyega’s Attack the Block (Joe Cornish, 2011). Or Anne-Sophie Nanki’s Ici s’Achève le Monde Connu (Here Ends the World We’ve Known, 2022), a film that featured an Indigenous woman and African man as protagonists of a dangerous and futile journey. I encourage everyone to review the festival film list if they’re interested in films that are grounded in alternative perspectives or insights from a diverse group of creatives. I look forward to the 2nd Black Europe Film Festival and ask for more films from the diaspora and more involvement with the capital city of Saint Paul since it has a rich Black history, too!  

Black Europe Film Festival
30 January – 2 February 2025
https://mspfilm.org/black-europe-film-festival/

Endnotes